At a hastily assembled meeting of the IRS procurement office on Wednesday, a top official had a troubling message for the team.
“We have DOGE,” he said. “They are down here in our office.”
Within a day, IRS procurement employees were told to quickly “close out” several contracts that had only recently been terminated — raising concerns that they would be stiffing contractors. Normally, there are several days or weeks between a contract’s termination and it being closed out to ensure all final expenses are covered and all work is paid for.
The acting chief procurement officer who alerted employees to DOGE’s presence, Guy Torres, left his job the following day, despite announcing that he was taking on the position just last week. Torres had been the deputy chief procurement officer since 2021. The chief of the data and strategy division within the procurement office, Tommy Bennett, also left Friday.
After this story was published, IRS spokesperson Jodie Reynolds told HuffPost that Torres and Bennett had both been planning to retire since around the time of the “Fork in the Road” email offering federal workers a deferred resignation program. Torres’ last day is March 11, she said, and Bennett’s last day was Friday.
An IRS procurement official shared details and documents related to the DOGE assault with HuffPost, which is not sharing their name to protect them from possible retaliation. The office processes the IRS’ contracts with outside companies, such as technology vendors.
For IRS officials, the order to quickly close out contracts without first confirming that contractors had been paid all the money owed to them for work and expenses rang alarm bells.
“Toward the end of the day today we received urgent instructions to close out these contracts within a few hours,” the IRS procurement official told HuffPost Thursday. “Policy states that we cannot close out contracts without making sure all payments are settled and we receive a release of claims from the contractor.”
“It’s just such a rapid turnaround that there’s no way that the procedures could have been followed,” they added.
Requests for comment to the former procurement office leaders went unanswered Friday.
Are you a government official who’s been pressured to violate rules or laws? Contact HuffPost senior reporter Matt Shuham on Signal at 646-397-4678 or at mattshuham@protonmail.com. Don’t use a work device or network.
One small business owner whose contract was being canceled told HuffPost that “nothing about this is normal.” She found out about the terminations by email, and said the IRS officials her company was working with weren’t even aware her contract had been terminated Thursday.
“Ironically enough, my job is to make government more effective and efficient,” said Leila Rao of AgileXtended, a small consulting firm that was working to modernize IRS technology and information flows. “This is the most inefficient way to pursue efficiency I’ve ever seen.”
Rao said she’d heard that DOGE representatives “killed our contract just based on a few buzzwords they don’t like,” like “communications,” “consulting,” or “professional services.” She said between the IRS contract and another recently canceled contract at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, 70% of her business has now disappeared. She worried that if the cuts held, her company would have to let go of two-thirds of its 15 employees.
Normally, Rao noted, a terminated contract would take several weeks to fully close out. But this time, she said, a helpful IRS procurement officer had encouraged her to get any final invoices in quickly — because “they’re getting pressure to not just terminate contracts, but to disburse that money… the implication is, ‘as soon as you accept this, we can have that money marked unclaimed,’ and they have other uses for that money.”
One of several emails she received from the IRS in the past day asked if her company was “open to a no cost settlement” and if so, “please confirm and provide a release of claims.”
She worried the unusual language might be an attempt to bilk her out of compensation for her firm’s work.
“That’s not language I’ve ever seen from the government,” she said.
The New York Times reported Tuesday that two DOGE representatives had “pushed for access to agency databases, including, most recently, one that has information about the agency’s contractors.”
The cuts at the IRS reflect a broader slash-and-burn agenda carried out by Trump officials, and particularly the team at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, to cut with a hacksaw first and ask questions later.
The cuts have often left dangerous or even potentially deadly destruction in their wake — such as with widespread contract cancellations at the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department, which a judge insisted on Thursday that the Trump administration reverse by Monday.
Many workers who were summarily fired by the administration have since been ordered to be rehired by judges or rehired due to supervisors’ need for their work.
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Thousands of probationary IRS employees were already laid off last month, and potentially tens of thousands more may face job cuts in the near future. That’s raising concerns that the gutting of the agency could weaken efforts to fight fraud — and could cost taxpayers more than DOGE ever saves.
